Years ago, after President Lyndon B. Johnson sent a massive force to Vietnam and initiated the American buildup against North Vietnam, I recalled a seminar I took at Stanford on Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War. In a chapter on “The Melian Dialogue,” I learned that Athens had invaded Melos, a tiny island in thrall to Sparta, and put most of its civilian residents to the sword. With Melos in mind, I wrote a letter to my father who had served in the South Pacific during World War II, and laid out all the arguments why our involvement in Vietnam was morally reprehensible and would certainly fail.

The war in Gaza brings back a swarm of memories about Vietnam protests on American college campuses, our death toll of 58,000 soldiers, the conscription of my generation that fell heavily on young men who did not go to college, and the rebellion of an entire generation that did not trust “anyone over 30.”

Gaza is an island of more than 2 million men, women and children enclosed in a strip of coastal land, underscored by over 300 miles of subterranean tunnels. Ruled by a jihadist group that has pledged to drive Jews out of Israel and reclaim the land for Muslims, the Palestinians in Gaza have suffered thousands of deaths while caged between the Israeli Defense Forces and terrorist paramilitaries hiding anywhere they can blend in with noncombatants.

Israel is an imperfect democracy clinging to an almost indefensible piece of land on the western edge of the Middle East. In my lifetime the U.S. has worried that the 76-year war between Jews and Arabs there would become the tinderbox of a third world war.

Today, war is hybrid, waged equally by weapons and words. Behind Hamas and its self-described “axis of resistance” composed of three other terrorist organizations is Iran’s Shia army, who together planned the massacre of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, the birthday of Vladimir Putin, which was no coincidence; revolutionary groups who proclaim a “new world order” often act on dates they regard as memorable. Hamas is a proxy of Iran, and Iran is manufacturing drones Putin uses to destroy Ukraine.

Hamas is waging war against Jews with rhetoric borrowed from Soviet propaganda employed during the Cold War, according to which Israel is an “apartheid state” committing “genocide” against Palestinians that is financed by the “colonialist” United States. The divestment movement against Israel today copies the one used against the Afrikaaner regime in South Africa. These old tactics signal that Russia is circulating a warmed-up narrative against the West, which Putin is determined to replace under his current aggressive strategy of Eurasianism.

In Vietnam we took over a failed war by a colonialist power, France, against a North Vietnam supplied by Russia. In Gaza, we are supplying a Mideast ally, Israel, who is trying to eradicate an “axis of resistance” against its existence as a nation. Gaza reverses the pattern of Vietnam.

Today, “colonialism” is dead, except in the minds of undereducated Ivy Leaguers who repeat the slogans of a former KGB agent engaged in Soviet-style hegemony. Putin’s ally, Iran, is asserting its Persian dreams against a Sunni coalition that was making peace with Israel before the October pogrom. Two former imperial powers, Russia and Iran, are attempting a proxy takeover of the territory of a failed imperial power, the Ottoman Turks, in the Middle East.

That is what the Gaza war is really about. Not genocide, a word coined by Raphael Lemkin at the Nuremberg trials in 1944 to name Adolf Hitler’s deliberate gassing of 6 million Jews. Not apartheid, an Afrikaaner word used to describe a racist regime in South Africa, and not colonialism, which was eradicated by freedom fighters who liberated their countries from European states after World War I.

Gazans deserve protection. Israeli hostages, if any are still alive in the recesses of the underworld constructed by Hamas, deserve freedom. Israel deserves to complete the Abraham Accords with Saudi Arabia to establish security and peace in the Mideast. And my fellow academics in American universities need to teach the complicated truth about our ongoing descent into war with authoritarian regimes determined to replace the Pax Americana.

Honolulu resident Jean E. Rosenfeld, Ph.D., is a historian and scholar of religious terrorism.